Gani and the curse of Aole

Gani Adams’ thirst for the controversial Aare Ona Kakanfo title, is clearly a push for self-actualization, after attaining the basics of life.

But given the jinx that comes with the deal, a yearn for societal recognition never comes with more baleful sweepstakes.

Ola Rotimi, in Kurunmi, put the ruin of Kurunmi of Ijaye, yet another Kakanfo, in the tale of the tortoise and his doomed travel.

Mr. Tortoise, the playwright teased, when would you return from your journey?

When I am disgraced, disgraced, disgraced, the tortoise chanted, as if stung and frozen by hubris, when I am disgraced!

Mr. Tortoise was the powerful Kakanfo Kurunmi of Ijaye, for picking war, when he could have chosen peace, against the equally formidable Ibadan army, led by Basorun Ogunmola. At the end, Kurunmi perished, with his five sons; and his city lay in ruins.

That was 1861, when the Oyo Empire was on a crumbling run.

Shortly after, Latoosa, the Ibadan war general, had a crack at the Kakanfo title. Baited to mount the Olubadan stool, he balked: the Olubadan was a “woman”, since by the Ibadan constitution, he was forbidden from going to war. But he, Latoosa, was a man of valour!

His wish, unspoken but loud enough, was to annex Olubadan to his Kakanfo title. But at the end, not even the mighty Latoosa could push his wish through.

Latoosa fell ill and died during the Kiriji campaign (1877-1893); forcing a constitutional stalemate. That merged into a hideous stalemate the Kiriji War had become, against the Ekiti Parapo, under the hardy Ogedengbe of Ilesa. Latoosa, history records, was the last general to lead Ibadan’s last war as a military power. But he didn’t conquer.

Still, Kurunmi and Latoosa were latter-day victims of the Kakanfo jinx. The jinx itself originated from the ancients, marked by the dreadful Aole curse.

Alaafin Aole so wanted to get rid of the powerful Kakanfo Afonja, the Ilorin warlord and most dreaded war general in the Oyo Empire of his day, who without much ado, annexed the Kakanfo title, after Kakanfo Oyabi died.

Alaafin Aole didn’t like that one bit. So, he saddled Afonja with an un-winnable war, such that after 90 days, and the Kakanfo didn’t triumph, he would commit suicide, by the severe code of his office.

But Afonja and war confederates somewhat penetrated the plot and hatched a counter-plot. From the battle zone, they sent the king an empty but covered calabash — a grim symbol of total rejection, at which the Alaafin must end his life.

Aole did. But he laid a curse — the dreaded curse of Aole — which doomed the Yoruba country to endless wars, plunder and capture; by kith-and-kin and by aliens.

Afonja of Ilorin, true enough, was the first victim of that curse. He not only died in his final battle with his Fulani usurpers, under the treacherous Alimi, he also lost Ilorin, his city, to them.

Thus began the Kakanfo jinx — which seems to have endured, with its latest victim the late MKO Abiola, who died in detention in 1998.

That is the title Gani Adams just inherited.

But as the Kakanfo of the ancient era was soaked in jinx, the Kakanfo of the modern era is drenched in the fierce politics of the Yoruba progressive/conservative divide — one, bowing to the moral majesty of the Ooni of Ife (custodian of the Yoruba cradle); the other, holding fealty to the imperial supremacy of the Alaafin of Oyo (proud inheritor of the Oyo Empire, the sole imperial state in Yoruba history).

Under the British colonial order and Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s Action Group (AG) government in early independence years, the Ooni of Ife, Oba Adesoji Aderemi (reigned 1930-1980), had scaled unmatched ascendancy, which climaxed in his appointment as Western Region governor (1960-1962), and re-established his post-empire preeminence in Yorubaland.

In contrast, no thanks to Alaafin Adeniran Adeyemi II’s squabble with the AG establishment (deposed in 1955 after mounting the throne in 1945), the Alaafin had sunk in the opposite direction.

So, when as Regional Premier, Samuel Ladoke Akintola (SLA) became the Aare Ona Kakanfo (the first in the modern era) in 1962, it was in the thick of the AG schism and regional crisis.

It was also a rally, by the Oyo-speaking Yoruba, for one of their own, against the Awo AG establishment. It was Yoruba neo-civil war under high-wire politics, with high calibre casualties.

Awo went to gaol. But SLA also perished in the 15 January 1966 coup, to sustain the jinx that the Kakanfo seldom ended well.

The MKO Kakanfo story also followed the same pattern. Abiola’s Kakanfo path was the Yoruba conservatives’ challenge to Awo’s post-2nd Republic (1979-1983) progressive mainstream. MKO had led a futile charge, from the conservative National Party of Nigeria (NPN), to uproot that hegemony.

Though MKO was named Kakanfo in 1988 (three clear years after the fall of the 2nd Republic and one year after Awo’s death), it was in the context of the Ooni-Alaafin tango for supremacy in the old Oyo State (now Oyo and Osun states). Abiola, a Gbagura man from Egbaland, had an Oyo ancestry. His father was Balogun of Ojoo, Ibadan.

Still, 10 years later in 1998, the Kakanfo jinx struck again. MKO died in the Abacha gulag, after languishing there for four years, for challenging the lawless annulment of his presidential mandate. Cold comfort, though: MKO died a martyr of Nigerian democracy.

Ironically, Gani Adams is blundering on the Kakanfo title, after the rather rash politicking of 2015.

The South West progressives had split, with the old Awoists supporting President Goodluck Jonathan, simply because they detested the other faction, under Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, doing an electoral entente with Muhammadu Buhari’s North West.

OPC also later rallied for their commander-in-chief with a Lagos show of brazen outlawry, just to press their loyalty. They lost the election but OPC gained fresh notoriety, derision and contempt from civil and polite society.

Ironically, with his Kakanfo announcement, Gani’s old allies in the Afenifere camp have thumbed it down as rash, callow and over-ambitious. But the other camp has given him qualified encouragement.

Is this then the birth of fresh electoral alliances for 2019?

Adams himself has been rather excitable over the Kakanfo jinx — who wouldn’t? — telling anyone he would buck it by not dying young. That is no illegitimate wish, and his lovers would say amen to that.

But the Kakanfo is not unlike fearlessly treading where angels dread. Still, however his tenure ends nestles in the womb of time.